John Aubrey: My Own Life (33 page)

. . .

I made diligent enquiry
³⁷
at Egham for Cooper’s Hill, the setting of Sir John Denham’s poem, which I remember printed at Oxford on brown paper during the war. But the inhabitants did not know any such place. At length an old man (Mr Ansted) sent his servant with me to the place.

. . .

I have reached Runnymede
³⁸
where the Great Charter – the Magna Carta – was first sealed in 1215.

August

I have had the pleasantest pilgrimage that ever any man has had I think since the Reformation. Strangers in Surrey were very civil to me, much more so than the ones I met on my perambulations of Wiltshire.

I shall go next to Sussex if the weather holds and the ways are travellable, and afterwards to either Berkshire or Oxfordshire.

I am still searching
³⁹
for answers to Mr Wood’s questions. He is still hard at work collecting information for his biographical register of the authors and bishops who have attended the University of Oxford since 1500.

. . .

Quaere
⁴⁰
: if Mr John Evelyn, who has written on planting and gardening, is an Oxford man? I know him from the Royal Society, but would like to know him better. During my perambulation of Surrey I visited his house at Wotton. It has a good prospect, which I made a sketch of.

. . .

I think and hope
⁴¹
that Mr Wood will help find me some money to ease the cost of my perambulation: it would be a token in return for all the information I have been collecting to help him in his researches.

. . .

September

I am back
⁴²
at my lodgings in London and have seen Mr Hooke and Sir Christopher Wren and have talked to them of my description of Surrey. I have another week of work to do the other side of the Thames, which I kept for last. I have taken great pains over this task, but with much delight. If Mr Ogilby deals honourably with me, he will print all the extracts of the records in the Tower and in the Domesday Book, which I have obtained, and it will be a pretty piece. But I begin to fear that Mr Ogilby is a fickle and subtle man who cannot be trusted. I suspect he might discard the notes I have so diligently collected and not include them in his printed work.

. . .

20 September

On this day James, Duke of York, whose first wife died two years ago, married the Italian Princess Mary of Modena. She is fifteen years old and widely regarded as an agent of the Pope.

. . .

I met Mr Ogilby
⁴³
and Mr Hooke at Garraway’s coffee house, which was, as usual, a hive of speculators and lotteries. Mr Hooke seemed weary.

Garraway’s is Mr Hooke’s favourite coffee house. It is in Exchange Alley, near the Royal Exchange. It was built above an old monastery crypt after the Great Conflagration. There are small rooms downstairs and a large coffee room upstairs, full of people reading or talking about the news.

. . .

October

My friend Christopher Wase
⁴⁴
– schoolmaster and scholar – has been commissioned by the Vice Chancellor and Regius Professor of Civil Law to report on the state of our free schools in England. He tells me it would greatly help to procure a table of the exhibitions for maintaining poor scholars at school or university. This is much needed as the corporations studiously suppress divulgence of their trusts, perhaps because they are afraid the funds will be seized if discovered. Mr Wase asks me to help him by seeing the Lord Mayor to this purpose. Here is a list of the questions about the free schools in each diocese that the enquiry will use to gather information:

1. Who was the founder?
   
2. When was it founded?
   
3. How endowed?
   
4. What schoolmaster and succession of masters? (Otherwise, such as are in memory to have been eminent, or authors of any extant work.)
   
5. What exhibitions and in which university?
   
6. Who are the governors, patrons and visitors?
   
7. What libraries are in the school, or in adjoining towns, with what manuscripts?
   

. . .

Three days into my journey to complete my survey of Surrey my horse either broke out of the pound at Esher, or else was stolen. I have been searching for him and heard nothing of him ever since. I walked yesterday from Esher to Richmond on foot. In some respects I would rather do this work pedestrian than equestrian anyway. But by the middle of next week I shall either buy another horse or have a friend lend me one.

I am ashamed
⁴⁵
to have discovered that no one from Magdalen Hall wrote to thank Mr Hobbes for his copy of his works. It cost him 25s. to have the book printed and bound, but he was not even sent word from the college that it had been received.

I hope that my Templa Druidum is to be printed at last.

. . .

I have news that my horse is at Kingston.

. . .

I went to collect my horse: his fees for pounds, etc. came to eight shillings. I have learnt that Mr Ogilby has changed his mind and will make no use of my work after all (he will include no more than four or five pages on any county in his book, and will get what scraps he can out of existing books or by hearsay). Nor will he reimburse the expenses I have incurred all this time on his account: for God, not a shilling. So I have perambulated Surrey to my very great content but am out of purse by about 4 or 5 li. at least. God deliver me of such men. Mr Hooke believes he will be able to bring Mr Ogilby round again by next spring. I do not much care, but I should have been glad to go on and survey Sussex.

PART IX

Penury

Anno 1673

14 October

I HAVE RETURNED
¹
to London. Mr Hooke has lent me twenty shillings and I have promised to repay him.

. . .

28 October

I dined this evening
²
with Mr Ashmole and Mr Dugdale. I talked to them about Mr Ogilby’s treatment of me and they both assure me that unless he makes use of the notes I have collected for him, his book will be a mere bauble, a trifling thing. But I do not think Mr Ogilby will change his mind and do right by me.

Mr Ashmole once lived
³
at Weston near Albury with his first wife. I asked him about the Roman temple on Blackheath. He says he remembers the ground pinning of the square, and also that of the circle surrounding it. I asked him too about the enormous snails I saw on the Albury downs. He says they were brought into England from Italy by the old Countess of Arundel, who dressed them and ate them.

. . .

November

I have sent
⁴
Mr Hobbes’s two lives in Latin (one in verse, one in prose) to Mr Wood. I pray that he takes care of them, for of the life in prose there is no other copy in England. I will collect it from Mr Wood when next I am in Oxford. Christmas will be a busy time, and I think it might be better to go to Oxford in May and walk to Botley to hear the winged choristers sing.

. . .

I have been to Richmond
⁵
to see my old friend from Trinity College, William Radford, who is a schoolteacher there. While I was staying with him, he took to his bed. I stayed talking to him, remembering how he visited me when I had smallpox when I was a student and saved me from boredom. We spoke of old times and the frolic to London on foot that he made together with Mr Anthony Wood’s elder brother Ned and Thomas Mariett.

. . .

To my great grief, my honoured friend William Radford has died.

. . .

I have sent Mr Wood
⁶
information about Easton Pierse that is not shown on any map.

. . .

My friend Sir John Hoskyns
⁷
has written to me announcing the birth of his son and asking me to send to Henry Coley for the horoscope. The baby was born on 14 November at 4.48 a.m.

. . .

I have drafted
⁸
a list of questions that might be sent out to collect information on the geography, natural history, antiquity, etc. of different counties. There will be nineteen numbered questions under the heading: ‘Queries in order to the Description of Britannia’. The questions could be sent through the counties to likely persons, invited to reply in writing, either upon certain knowledge, or else good authority, directing each of their remarks to the relevant numbered question and specifying the county and hundred wherein the remark falls.

. . .

20 November

Today I drank
⁹
a bottle of wine with Mr Hooke and Mr Shortgrave. In payment of my debt to Mr Hooke, I sold him some of my books:

– Euclid – works in Greek and Latin (10s.)

– Plunia –
Purpur
(1s.)

– Censorinus –
De Mensura Anni
(8d.)

– Duret –
Histoire des Langues
and Scaliger –
Contra Caldanum
(6s. 4d)

– Baytins –
De Re Navali
(2s.)

So now I am acquitted of the 20s. Mr Hooke lent me.

. . .

21 November

I presented Mr Hooke
¹⁰
with my book
Dell’ historia naturale
, by Ferrante Imperato (published in Venice last year), which he intends to place in the Royal Society’s library.

. . .

25 November

Mr Hooke has lent me
¹¹
another twenty shillings.

. . .

I visited the apothecary
¹²
and collector John Conyers, who has premises in Shoe Lane. After the Great Conflagration he collected a world of antique curiosities during the excavations of the ruins of London. There are many Roman antiquities in his collection.

. . .

9 December

I was hoping
¹³
to see Sir Christopher Wren in London yesterday, but he has had to go to Oxford. He has so much business in Whitehall at the moment that he has hardly any time to see me even when he is here in the city: he is one of my most necessary friends for securing some form of preferment. He is engaged in rebuilding London: St Paul’s and fifty-two other city churches. I trust he will help me to some form of income, which I sorely need.

. . .

27 December

I was at Garraway’s
¹⁴
coffee house with Mr Hooke, Mr Hambden, Mr Hill and Mr Lodwick until late.

. . .

Anno 1674

I have moved into rooms within a stone’s throw of Gresham College, from where I can easily help Mr Hooke with his experiments, and spend whole days with him.

My lodgings
¹⁵
are with Mrs More in Hammond Alley in Bishopgate Street, the farthest house opposite old James Tavern. I have got to know some honest fellows and good workmen in the area: ivory-turners and cane-makers. Curious tortoiseshell knives and telescopes are made here.

. . .

5 February

I presented
¹⁶
the Royal Society with some written observations concerning winds, their blowing down many hundreds of oaks at once and their blowing very differently in places little distant from one another.

. . .

23 February